It’s just so bizarre I couldn’t believe it was true – I actually went online this morning to double-check that the Mazda/Lorax ad was real and not a spoof. Oh, I am so naïve to the bizarre ways of the world! Yes, of course the ad is real, not to mention surreal. The Lorax marketing team, spectacularly blind to the irony of it all, has indeed signed up 70 product tie-ins for the movie, most noteworthy among them an SUV. The little orange fellow who railed against Over-Consumption and Rampant Resource Extraction is suddenly blissed out over the fuel efficiency of the Mazda CX-5. The press releases trumpeted the fact that the commercial tie-ins were for eco-friendly products and green companies, though how far that goes I’m not sure.

Right at the end of the Mazda ad the Lorax prompts the narrator to plug his movie. Between the lines reading: “I flogged your car, now tell people to go to my movie!” I’ll scratch your back if you’ll scratch mine. Deee-pressing, not the least because an entire marketing team did not foresee any of this backfiring on them. Has the world gone mad?